Lift happens thanks to partnerships with local and international organizations who support the conference. We will introduce 5 of them every week. Check the full partners list, and contact us if you want to partner with the conference in Europe or Asia.

Media Partners

ICT JOURNAL

ICT Journal is a new platform for business news in the IT world. The monthly magazine and website informs Swiss readers about the current events in information technology, communication, the internet, and business.

CHARGED MAGAZINE

The human creative spirit is limitless. Charged is a celebration of that creativity in the mobile age. It’s about the people, companies and ideas behind the profound social changes of the mobile revolution. Charged is not about the technology, the devices, the networks, or the carriers. It’s about the way we live. We live mobile lives — always-on, and on the go.

Juliana Rotich is a blogger (Afromusing, Afrigadget), digital activist, citizen journalist and environment editor of Global Voices Online. With Global Voices, she helps to aggregate, curate and amplify online conversations, with particular focus on technology, the environment, renewable energy, and digital expression in Africa and the developing world.

Juliana is also the Program Director of Ushahidi.com, an innovative non-profit web startup that is creating a tool for mapping crises by gathering reports via mobile, e-mail and web. She is focused on using new media tools to create a network of environmental bloggers from around the world, elevating and encouraging more conversations and engagement on environmental matters.

Holding a BSc Degree in IT from the University of Missouri Kansas City she also has several years of experience in database administration, application development and project management. We are very much looking forward to hearing her speak on the solidarity theme on February 26th which she will bring alive together with Ramesh Srinivasan. Learn more about Juliana on her LIFT page.

Lift happens thanks to partnerships with local and international organizations who support the conference. We will introduce 5 of them every week. Check the full partners list, and contact us if you want to partner with the conference in Europe or Asia.

Main Partners

ALPIC T

The cantons of Western Switzerland announce the setting-up in 2008 of a cluster for the promotion of Information and Communication Technologies. This platform, called “AlpicT”, will be led by the canton of Geneva. AlpicT is entirely part of the economic development policy of Western Switzerland that aims at enhancing the economic, technological and industrial potential on a national and international level.

BREAD & BUTTER

At Bread and Butter we build the best branding solutions for your projects. No matter if your project is a start-up, a brilliant idea or a new department in a large-scale organization. You want to transform your vision into a strong, future oriented and efficient identity. And you want the buzz too.

Anjalika is an experience, graphic and furniture designer, ethnographer, artist and photographer. A participant in LIFT07, she will be back for LIFT09.

She is currently working as a designer at Philips Design (Healthcare), in Eindhoven, The Netherlands. During her studies she wrote papers on a variety of topics: using experience protoyping to gather feedback on interaction design, the history and trends of flexibility in in habitats and new approaches in learning environments for kids.

Anjalika graduated in 2007 from the Master programme in Interaction Design at the Umeå Institute of Design Umeå, Sweden. She also has a Bachelor’s degree in Interior Architecture from the Centre for Environmental Planning and Technology, India.

To find out more about Anjalika feel free to visit her LIFT profile.

We are glad to have David Rose on board as one of the speakers for the second part of the change theme on Thursday morning. David is a product designer, technology visionary, and social entrepreneur.

Currently he is Chief Executive at Vitality, a company that is reinventing medication packaging with wireless technology.

Before that David founded and lead a variety of organisations reaching from Ambient Devices, a company that embeds digital information into everyday objects, Viant's Innovation Center, Opholio, an online photo-sharing site and Interactive Factory, a company that is best known for developing the LEGO Mindstorms Robotic Invention System.

Rose taught Interaction Design at Yale, and Information Visualization at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. He received his BA in Physics from St. Olaf College, studied Interactive Cinema at the MIT Media Lab, and earned a Masters Degree from Harvard University.

To learn more about him please visit his LIFT profile page.

About
Mitch Free is a serial entrepreneur, founder and CEO of MFG.com, an online marketplace which helps in sourcing manufactured parts by matching the requirements and specifications of the buyer with the skills and savoir-faire of a supplier. Prior to that, Mitch founded 3DATUM, a provider of technology solutions for the manufacturing and engineering communities. He began his career as a machinist on the shop floor, got his hands dirty and literally learned the manufacturing industry inside and out.

He's been widely recognized as an inspiring and ground-breaking entrepreneur who follows his instincts. He also is an avid speaker at technology conferences and at universities including the Kellogg School of Business at Northwestern University, Harvard and the Society of Manufacturing Engineers. At LIFT09 Mitch will be a participant. We're looking forward to seeing him there.

With an interdisciplinary background as engineer, designer, social scientist, and ethnographer, Ramesh researched topics as diverse as the relation between indigenous and local knowledge systems and new media or the use of design and social-science perspectives to analyze the impacts of information technology on global education, health, economics, politics, governance, and social movements, and infrastructure.

Ramesh earned a doctorate in design from Harvard University, a Master of Science in Media Arts and Sciences from MIT Media Laboratory and a Bachelor of Science in Industrial Engineering from Stanford University. He currently is Assistant Professor in the Department of Information Studies and Design|Media Arts at the University of California Los Angeles. Amongst others he has given talks at the World Bank, UNESCO, Government of India and Microsoft Research. Please find more info on his LIFT profile.

Why LIFT
Ramesh is interested in the divergent notions of futurism and utopia with respect to every layer of media and technology. His thoughts on diverse cultural domains around media and technology presents some very different notions of pastness, and future aspirations, ones that are very much locally grounded in environment, family, cosmology, and landscape.

What Ramesh expects
The 2009 edition will be Ramesh's first LIFT conference and he'll be curiously heading to Geneva in February for an animated exchange on where the future went.

Tom is founder of Future Platforms, a small team of designers and developers who build delightful software products for mobile phones. He's been doing this since 2000; before that he spent 5 years working in the web industry. A mobile web expert, Tom has recently been invited to work on a project for the W3C's Mobile Web Best Practices Group. You can find more info about Tom on his blog.

Why LIFT
We asked Tom what LIFT is for him and why he decided to come back: "For me, LIFT is a great way to get some perspective. I meet a crowd of folks, chiefly from across Europe, who are completely outside my day-to-day experience and who invariably see things completely differently from myself. The mix of arts, academia and business is particularly helpful in this way, and the event is small enough to feel intimate and friendly, and big enough to provide some variety."

What Tom expects
Being an old-time LIFTer, Tom expects the unexpected when coming back to Geneva for LIFT09.

Vinton Gray "Vint" Cerf is an American computer scientist who, together with Robert Kahn, invented the Internet. His contributions have been recognized repeatedly, with honorary degrees and awards that include the National Medal of Technology, the Turing Award, the Japan Prize, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Vint has worked for Google as its Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist since October 2005. In this role he has become well known for his predictions on how technology will affect future society, encompassing such areas as artificial intelligence, environmentalism, the advent of IPV6 and the transformation of the television industry and its delivery model. He is also working with NASA on the implementation of an interplanetary extension of the Internet.

Why LIFT
For Vint, LIFT is an opportunity to see through many eyes the strengths and weaknesses of prediction and vision about the Future. He would like to compare with others the speculative exploration of future, unexplored landscapes and to compare those speculative explorations with the reality that emerged from the past.

What Vint expects
Vint has high expectations for the conference in February. He told us that he would like to have a much clearer sense of what the future may hold, in part to enhance imagination and also to find realistic paths towards technological progress.

Dear LIFTers,

World Usability Day will take place on Thursday 13 November this year and I'm happy to announce that Telono is, once again, organizing a networking event in Geneva!

This year, for the first time, we will have several guest speakers eager to tell you about their experience of user-centred design in practice, as well as a demo of eye-tracking, followed by our traditional apéro.

To see the full program and to register, please go to:
http://www.telono.com/wud2008.htm

I hope to see you there & wish you all the best!

Florian.-